Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Watch: I, Destini by 25 New Face Filmmakers Nicholas Pilarski and Destini Riley
Filmmakers Nicholas Pilarski and Destini Riley landed on this year’s 25 New Faces list on the basis of I, Destini, their haunting animation dealing with familial loss and the criminal justice system. The short has just gone online at the New York Times as part of its OpDocs series, and the two have penned an essay about the piece’s subject matter and collaboration at the Times. From the piece: We first met each other in 2014 after one of these meetings, in which community members discussed how we could pressure the police into providing better ethics training. Destini’s brother had […]
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Daniels’ Possibilia Explores the Possibilities of Interactivity
Billed as an “interactive love story set in the multiverse,” Possibilia, a short film from the dynamic writing/directing duo known as Daniels, tells the story of a couple (Alex Karpovsky and Zoe Jarman) on the verge of a break-up with 16 potential outcomes that are left to the viewer. The project, which screened at both Sundance, Tribeca, and other festivals back in 2014, now gets an online release over at Eko (previously Interlude), the interactive video creation platform. Like Daniels’ recent feature Swiss Army Man, Possibilia relies on humor to subvert the genre and push the conventions of the medium. Filmmaker recently […]
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26th Annual Gotham Awards To Take Place Monday, November 28th
IFP, Filmmaker‘s parent organization, today announced that the 26th Annual Gotham Awards will take place this year at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City on Monday, November 28th. The first awards show of the season, the Gotham Awards, established in 1991, is one of the leading honors for independent film and media, celebrating authentic voices behind and in front of the camera. The 2015 top film category winners were Spotlight (Best Feature), The Look of Silence (Best Documentary) and Tangerine (Audience Award). Nominated by committee recommendation in the first year, the Long Form Breakthrough Series category will be open to […]
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Watch: Seventy Years of Los Angeles, Then and Now
The New Yorker recently commissioned filmmaker Kevin McAlester to recreate a 70-year-old drive through downtown Los Angeles. The resulting split-screen tour of the same streets in the downtown L.A. neighborhood of Bunker Hill in the 1940s and today shows how much the streets have changed and the city has grown. By the 1950s, the neighborhood, which had previously featured some of the city’s most elegant mansions and hotels, had been turned into low-income housing, according to The New Yorker. The area was highlighted in several noir films as well as in The Exiles, the 1961 film which chronicled the lives of young Native Americans living in […]
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Buster Keaton’s The General Turns 90 with Tour and Live Score
To celebrate the 90th Anniversary of Buster Keaton’s classic film The General, throughout August Portland’s historic Hollywood Theatre and Oregon Film will present a state-wide tour of the film with a new live score composed by film composer Mark Orton. Above you can check out a trailer for the film presentation. Considered one of the best comedies of the silent era, The General finds hapless Southern railroad engineer Johnny Gray (Buster Keaton) facing off against Union soldiers during the American Civil War. When Johnny’s fiancée, Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack), is accidentally taken away while on a train stolen by Northern forces, Gray pursues the soldiers, using various modes of transportation in […]
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Redford Center Grants Program Backs Features with Environmental Bent
Last month, The Redford Center announced the launch of Redford Center Grants, a grant program aimed at supporting the production of films that seek to raise global awareness of environmental issues. Funded by The New York Community Trust, The Redford Center Grants program will support filmmakers with feature-length projects that are in early stages of development and that are focused on driving awareness, education and action on environmental topics. Though there is no specification that the films must be non-fiction, on the list of Films We Love, The Redford Center highlights documentaries such as Super Size Me, Gasland, Virunga, The Cove, and […]
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25 New Faces of Film 2016
Click here to read this year’s 25 New Faces of Film.
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The Fine Print: How To Understand and Negotiate a Film Distribution Contract
There are many new distribution options for the independent producer. The old media includes theatrical, broadcast/cable, home video; new media’s alphabet soup includes TVOD, SVOD, AVOD, EST, PPV, streaming and nontraditional theatrical. As new distribution channels develop, new distribution companies emerge. But not all distributors are effective in all mediums and markets. Just as you would not expect Netflix or Vimeo to release your work theatrically (Netflix’s recent self-originated productions to the contrary), you would not expect Gathr and Tugg to broadcast or cablecast your work. As a consequence of all these new distribution channels and the splitting up of […]
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Because Breaking Up is Hard to Do
As a cinematographer, I’m always looking for the perfect marriage: the director I can lock eyes with to communicate volumes without uttering a word. Someone who knows how to use my work to its best potential, who can challenge my ideas about filmmaking and push me to reach places I didn’t think I could — and then keep going. In my dreams, it never starts and ends with one film. It’s a lifelong journey to seek out something greater. All my heroes have these sorts of relationships: the Coens and Deakins, Allen and Willis, Iñárritu and Prieto (maybe now Lubezki?!). When meeting with directors, […]
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It’s Not Always About the Money
There’s been a great deal of talk recently in our film community about the concept of sustainability. There hasn’t, however, been a great deal of precision. Take the word itself — “sustainable.” It’s most often defined by its absence. But by the time we ask, “What is a sustainable career?” the answer comes back, and it’s usually simply: “Not this.” We’ve adopted the idea of sustainability from the environmental movement, where it describes the quest to make an ecosystem stable and long-lasting. Sustainability’s myriad definitions range from the utopian (“all systems in dynamic balance”) to the terse, harsh pragmatism of its Latin root, […]
